Travelling has always been fascinating to humans. Whether it is travelling in space or time. Time travel has always been an object of intrigue to many. The mere imagination of time travel comes with numerous contradictions. One among the famous paradox related to time travel is the “Grandfather’s Paradox”. If a time traveler killed his own grandfather before he was born, then he would not have existed, and so he would not have travelled to the past and murdered his grandfather. This creates a paradox.
There is another fascinating paradox called as the Bootstrap paradox. This unlike Grandfather’s paradox deals with an object or information trapped in the loop of time without a definite existence. Let’s take a scenario where a man goes back to the past and gifts his grandmother a pocket watch which he in turn inherited from her. Now the true origin of the pocket watch is lost because the grandmother got it from the time traveler, and she gifted it to her grandson who was in turn the time traveler who she received it from. This pocket watch is trapped in the time loop in which cause and effect repeat in a circular pattern. This is what is called as the Bootstrap Paradox.
This paradox also implies on information. A famous example is of a time traveler who travels into past and teaches Einstein the “Theory of relativity”. We cannot tell that the theory was originated from the traveler as he learnt it from books published by Einstein. Einstein is also not the origin of the theory because he learnt it from the traveler. And hence the source of this information is ensnared in time.
The most extreme case of the paradox is a human whose existence is not known. If a man named ‘X’ travels to past and impregnates a woman who is supposedly his mother and she gives birth to the traveler i.e. the same man ‘X’, his source of origin remains mysteriously unknown.
Paradox Pegasus 